Monitoring and scaling with ContainerPilot telemetry

April 12, 2016

Application health checking is a key feature of ContainerPilot (formerly Containerbuddy). The user-defined health check gives us a binary way of determining whether the application is working. If the application is healthy, ContainerPilot sends a heartbeat to the discovery catalog, and if it's not, other ContainerPilot-enabled applications will stop sending requests to it. But automatic scaling of a service depends on more than just the pass/fail of a health check. Every application has key performance indicators that tell us if the service is nearing overload and should be scaled up or is under-utilized and can be scaled down.